Late to the Party

I was trying to optimise my life today, by making a Google sheet that lists all of my children’s school events, and after that I thought it would be great to have a script that could automatically create these as events in a calendar. I already have a calendar allocated for the kids, I just don’t want to do it manually.

Hence I googled how to do it with AppScript, which is like macro in Excel, but for Google Sheets. I am hopelessly incapable of coding, so I found this guide and followed it. It’s quite good, but it has vital steps hidden in other linked posts somewhere else in Medium. Also the guide uses ‘shift’ and ‘signups’, which I wanted to change to events, but then I got confused.

I googled and after a while, thought of using ChatGPT. It amazingly found my errors, and corrected it. It even offered to add some other functions, such as checking for duplicates. Before long, I was adding new functions that I can never expect to write myself. There were also some parts that I didn’t understand, like the variables or functions, and ChatGPT explained it to me. I was amazed!

Yes, I am late to the party, as everyone has already been prompting till their quota ran out. However, I have been using it before, but just for outlining documents and I think ChatGPT helps in brainstorming but there is no real content and it waffles a lot. I guess in the case of coding, I am a beginner and these things are just the basic, so that’s why I am amazed, compared to my experience in reading and writing documents. Still, it is a very powerful tool and has helped me a lot today.

Still considering to pay or not for the unlimited prompt, aka ‘Pro’ account. Let me sleep on it.

Thank you for reading.